Originally posted by Digitalis One of the very rare instances where people in corporate marketing prove they have functioning brains.
Well, I'm not against changing the front brand name to RICOH. In marketing terms, it would makes sense :
- RICOH is mainly a photocopier and printer manufacturer, and now has (already had for decades in fact) a strong camera department, like another famous photocopier, printer and camera manufacturer : Canon. Being compared to Canon because of this similarity is all but a bad thing.
- Pentax is an historical brand, but had some average or bad press for years before the buyout. Professionals and journalist may be thinking "oh, that loosy brand, again.." when seeing new products. Changing from Pentax to Ricoh like Sony did when buying out Minolta is not necessarily a bad move in these circumstances, IMHO
- Ricoh was a rather small (if not very small) camera manufacturer for decades, but they were (and still are) very innovative. We, as a user, would still have some reason to be proud of this brand/products.
Think about the actual situation : we've started to name this brand/camera "ricotax" or other funny names, because they chose to put Ricoh in the website, on the manual, on fair's booth but Pentax only on the camera. This is terrible because old Pentax users and professionals/journalist still think that Pentax is a brand name, while it's only a product name now. Had they dropped Pentax entirely wouldn't have changed
anything from a product point of view, only in the minds of the - small - user base (and I'm one of them since 2007), but marketing ads are there to fix that, theoretically.So it would have been a brand new era.
On the other hand, Nikon is a subsidiary of Mitsubishi (IIRC). You don't even know that when buying their camera and going to their fair's booth. Canon, Nikon and Sony shows only one brand, Panasonic has their LUMIX camera range, but they have been identified as a camera line from the beginning, that's why they put Panasonic and LUMIX on their camera. Ricoh is in a rather uncommon situation.
Anyway, whatever they decide to do in a marketing point of view, I thanks very much Ricoh for saving this brand and our assets.
/ a K-1 proud owner